Terence Tao

But, you know, there are things that are...

I mean, I don't spend as much time as I do as a postdoc, you know, just working on one problem at a time or fooling around.

I still do that a little bit.

But yeah, as you advance in your career, the more soft skills, so math somehow front-loads all the technical skills to the early stages of your career.

So yeah, as a postdoc, as a publisher or parish, you're

You're incentivized to basically focus on proving very technical theorems, so prove yourself as well as prove the theorems.

But then as you get more senior, you have to start mentoring and giving interviews and trying to shape direction of the field both research-wise and sometimes you have to do various administrative things.

And it's kind of the right social contract because you need to work in the trenches to see what can help mathematicians.

Some recognition is necessarily important.

But yeah, it's...

It's also important to not let these things take over your life and only be concerned about getting the next big award or whatever.

Again, you see these people try to only solve the really big math problems and not work on things that are less sexy, if you wish, but actually still interesting and instructive.

As you say, the way the human mind works, we understand things better when they're attached to humans, and also if they're attached to a small number of humans.

The way our human mind is wired, we can comprehend

the relationship between 10 or 20 people.

But once you get beyond 100 people, there's a limit.

I think there's a name for it.

Beyond which, it just becomes the other.

So you have to simplify the whole mass.

99.9% of humanity becomes the other.